Birth .

Birth is the prototype for all discontinuities in the relation between a mind and its objects. Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero introduced this theme into psychoanalytic literature.

Freud took an interest in dreams of birth in an addendum to The Interpretation of Dreams. Birth, as a passage from intra-uterine life to extra-uterine life became for him "the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety".

Other authors have applied the term "psychic birth" to the moment when children become conscious of their individuation and the separation between them and their libidinal objects.